It's a sad day when we're getting video game news from MSNBC. It seems like anybody with half a credential could send out a news release "predicting" a price change and some news outlet would report it. Don't believe the hype until Sony/Big N/MS say something.
I hope Nintendo doesn't do a price cut, but instead creates a super bundle. Put the Gamecube, GBA SP, and a game for each. Keep the $150 price level. Parents will love it because they see it as getting two consoles for the price of one, kids will love getting more, adult gamers (myself included) will enjoy the linkable features that are upcoming. Plus, they could have theme packs. The Zelda, Metroid, and Mario also have big name games on both consoles (with Zelda and Metroid having link capacity). Hell, there could even be an Animal Crossing bundle with Animal Crossing and an e-Reader instead of a GBA-SP game since you can download NES games instead.
I dunno why it's so hard to find people who write the viruses, maybe we can get Hillary Rosen and her crack team at the RIAA on the case, they seem to be good at finding evil do-ers on the interweb
The notion that you could make EDRS standardized, mandated, and tamper-proof is absurd. Sorry, it just is. Car companies span across the globe. There is no one mandated organization that controls them all. Thus, you'll never have standardization or mandates. And as far as tamper-proof goes, define tamper-proof. If tamper-proof is the inability for the average person from messing with it, then they are already tamper-proof. This isn't like erasing a message on your answering machine. It's a little chipset integrated with your other car electronics. To tamper with it, you'd have to know how to get to it, how to access the data, and how to replace the data. Unless you work for the auto industry or NTSB designing these things, you probably don't know hwo to do that. So isn't that tamper-proof enough?
The truth of the matter is these things are designed to save lives, not spy on you. They aren't recording your travel route through town, noting when you go pick up some fast food or black tar heroin. It gages your speed and other safety factors in your car like acceleration, blinkers, angle of tires, gas usage, etc. And it's not like they're designed by incompetant morons either. So the arguement of "what if your car goes airborn with your foot on the gas and it looks like you're going 90" goes out the window. You could take the data set of velocity and accelration to kids in a high school physics class and they'll be able to point out what happened. Crash investigators will be able to to the same, especially when they see your car upside down on the side of the road. So stop being paranoid people, the little chips in your car aren't out to get you.
I live in Kansas and I've visited numerous wind farms across the state while doing feasability studdies on them. Most of the noise complaints from citizens quickly die off as the normal perating sounds quickly fade into white nosie once they've been calibrated and equiped with dampeners. Also, in comparison, if somebody built a nuclear power plant or coal burning plant in the same spot as a wind farm would be built, those plants woulds produce 1000x the noise of wind farms and would look horrid anyways.
It's just sad that people always have to find some minor flaw with any power source to decry it. Some polute, some are loud, some require thousands of people to run, some dam rivers. Wind power is the cheapest, quietest, and most "eligant" design of any power source with practically zero impact on the environment.
At some point I need to just need to buy a bunch of DVDs and form The Retrospectus Of Video Game Movies and watch them for days straight until my brain starts to bleed. The Wizard and the live action Super Mario Bros are like the piannacle of Nintendo's movie making and have treasured (if not scary) places in my childhood memories
As was mentioned on Chewplastic's site, we might want to consider also doanting to Daniel Peng, another student who was hit by the RIAA at the same time. He seems to be having a harder time getting donations since he hasn't had as much media attention as Jesse Jordan did. Plus Jesse seems like he's not that far from getting his money back and I know the RIAA is sending out a WHOLE LOTTA CHECKS.
On a brief sidenote, this makes me very proud in the redeming qualities of the Internet and the overwhelming spirit of helping the Davids of the world fight thier Goliaths.
In the ultimate move of spite, take the $13 the RIAA is settling with and give it back to Jesse Jordan, the student who's life savings was taken by the RIAA in a "symbolic move." It's his money, we're just giving it back to him.
For example, see MTV's "Making The Game" shows modeled after their "Making The Video." They've did one of the LOTR:TT game and one on Def Jam Vendetta. They we're pretty much horrid 30 minute advertisements of repetitive gameplay videos and interviews with PR schmucks. Never once did they bother talking to the programmers or artists (probably for good reason). At least they didn't make one for Britney's Dance Factory, that would be the official end of Western Civilization.
You forgot the Virtual Boy:P Oh well, at least Nintenod's failed experiment with the VB led to their "why mess with a good thing" approach to GB development.
"Nintendo doesn't have a cool enough image to appeal to an older audience," Nikko's Fukuda said.
"What it should do is hold fast to the under-15 age group and create killer franchises based on cartoons or characters which can also be featured in card games."
If I get one of these (which I won't) I'll have to deal with the following two annoyances.
1. When playing games, people will ask me why I'm molesting my cell phone.
2. When talking on the phone, people will ask me why I'm talking into a gameboy.
I got a GBASP a month ago and it's become part of my standard gear I take with me everywhere I go (cell phone, wallet, keys, pen, GBASP). It's perfect for killing time between meetings, classes, etc. Plus it fits perfectly in my cargo pockets (hey, they finally have a use) and the platinum case makes me feel all bling bling.
You'll have to concede that the difficulty of implementing an SGI Fuel station into a college network is not anywhere near the relative scale of installing 30 Macs into a small school network. Hell, anybody who is a sys admin for a school district should by default need to now PC, Mac, and Linux these days. I'm not claiming they're lazy because the story has not mentioned their response, merely that the administrators shackled them with a Windows-only policy. Given their industry-standard job description and relative proximity to the Washington Tech Corridor, I'm fairly certain that they will be more than capable of putting 30 Macs in the network. This is just a case of school board members following one of their own (stupid)policies without thinking it out first. If this story is being/.'d then I'm fairly certain that they are getting enough flak about it and will allow the free Macs to be installed.
Quite frankly, I think Bill Gates has bigger fish to fry than some podunk town. I'm sure the logic was more on the side of the school board after they recieve the grant. It's like when you get a bottle of wine as a present. You thank the person out of courtesy. You don't know if the wine is any good or if you'll like it, but it seems like the polite thing to do. The school district thought this tokenistic thank you was an appropriate response when they really should have just said thank you.
I can back that statement up with my experience. I got to sit on a hiring committee for a new staff position that was responsible for being the technology "outreach" coordinator to students (letting them know about services, labs, computer deals through the university, etc). Because our labs are about 75% PC / 25% Mac and we have a good contract with Mac for shwocase technology, Mac knowledge was crucial. In the 400 something applications I had to sift through, I eliminated (by policy, not choice) 370 applications because they mentioned no experience with Macs.
The job market wants students to learn as much as possible about as much as possible (to steal a bad marketing phrase). Teaching kids how to use PCs AND Macs will benefit them so much years down the line. Hell, exposing the kids to computer use benefits them PERIOD.
As the teacher said "In a time of serious budget crunches in the schools, for them to turn down a gift of $43,000 just seems asinine." Couldn't have phrased it better myself.
Okay, sorry, that was an easy shot. I was in a high school computer club, so I feel your pain.
Here is some crap we did:
LAN Party, it's a gimmee. It builds interest and gest you new members. Try talking to local video game stores to sponser prizes or something. You can usually get like 5 recent games or something without much effort.
Computer Fixing. If you school lets you do it on school ground, have a day where students can drop off computer and you'll do diagnostics and upgrades for cheap. Go around to local stores and nail down prices that can't be beat. It will get you a load of cash and a little bit more respect at school. It's one thing to be a nerd, it's a different thing to be a nerd people go to for help.
Look into one of the many robot building competitions. There are about a hundred of them around and I'm sure you could find one you're elligible for. It's a great way to learn new technology, get yourself some PR in the local news, and it looks great on college transcripts if you're going into engineering or programming.
Speaking of college, try to get a tour of a naerby college together. You can usually swing a tour of their engineering facilities if you plan in advance. It will at least be a fun day and helpful to anybody who wants to go there. Plus, if it's out of town you can swing like a free weekend away from your parents if you can swing living arragements (or bring one adult to book a room in a hotel). Sure you can't drink yet and you most likely won't get into any college parties, but it's a weekend away and helps you get excited about college.
Seriously, tax the fricken parents. Make your kids go to the docotor for a checkup every year. If your kid comes back overweight, you pay a few more dollars. I gaurantee you that obesity in this country would start to drop if we forced parents to start acting like parents. Sign your kid up for a freaking soccer team or something. It's amazing how much weight little Johnny will lose if he has to go run around during practice and games a few times a week. Get your kids to eat pasta, salads, fruit. God forbid they might not like that you're making them live a healthy lifestyle. You can either have slightly discontent but healthy kids that'll have long, full lives and forget why they're mad at you quickly, or you can have lardass children that love you to death as a parent for no good reason, but will never get out of the house and will die of a heart attack before you ever croak.
But wait, we don't want to force parents to be grown ups. Screw that. Let's have all the adults keep acting like children. Point and blame other people for all the problems with your kids. Ignore reality. Act like a bratty 10 year old with legislative powers. Grow up adults, and start acting like one.
If you're going to sue me for damages for my mp3 collection, it assumes that they lost the money I would have spent on the product. This is faulty logic if i never had any intent on buying their product. 3 scenarios:
1.If I like the song (and others on the album), I'll go and buy it. Thus, they've suffered no lost
2. I don't like the song very much after all or the rest of the album is bad. I'm not going to buy it. My actions don't result in a loss because I don't buy CDs based on one song on the radio to begin with.
3. I have zero intention or have zero ability to purchase the album. Maybe it's a joke song. Maybe its a crappy song I'm downloading to irritate my roomate. Maybe it is something out of print or not offered by any retailers I have access too. There was never an anticipation of the RIAA getting any profit from me, so my download has no net effect.
Now I don't exactly think this arguemnt will stand up in court or anything. The RIAA has purchased enough laws to prosecute anybody they want. But the fact of the matter, which is made very clear by the RIAA goon's statement, is that the RIAA just doesn't get it. They've stifled the public's ability to get a variety of music for so long and now the dam has burst and they're drowning. People like to hear music. It makes us happy, sad, romantic, nostalgic, etc. But when you charge people inflated prices for little discs, raise concert prices above the $100 mark, homogonize the radio, and protest at the slightest attempt at competition, people are bound to turn on you at some point. The fact that they still haven't figured that out is a testament to how screwed up the industry is.
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It's a sad day when we're getting video game news from MSNBC. It seems like anybody with half a credential could send out a news release "predicting" a price change and some news outlet would report it. Don't believe the hype until Sony/Big N/MS say something.
I hope Nintendo doesn't do a price cut, but instead creates a super bundle. Put the Gamecube, GBA SP, and a game for each. Keep the $150 price level. Parents will love it because they see it as getting two consoles for the price of one, kids will love getting more, adult gamers (myself included) will enjoy the linkable features that are upcoming. Plus, they could have theme packs. The Zelda, Metroid, and Mario also have big name games on both consoles (with Zelda and Metroid having link capacity). Hell, there could even be an Animal Crossing bundle with Animal Crossing and an e-Reader instead of a GBA-SP game since you can download NES games instead.
I dunno why it's so hard to find people who write the viruses, maybe we can get Hillary Rosen and her crack team at the RIAA on the case, they seem to be good at finding evil do-ers on the interweb
The notion that you could make EDRS standardized, mandated, and tamper-proof is absurd. Sorry, it just is. Car companies span across the globe. There is no one mandated organization that controls them all. Thus, you'll never have standardization or mandates. And as far as tamper-proof goes, define tamper-proof. If tamper-proof is the inability for the average person from messing with it, then they are already tamper-proof. This isn't like erasing a message on your answering machine. It's a little chipset integrated with your other car electronics. To tamper with it, you'd have to know how to get to it, how to access the data, and how to replace the data. Unless you work for the auto industry or NTSB designing these things, you probably don't know hwo to do that. So isn't that tamper-proof enough?
The truth of the matter is these things are designed to save lives, not spy on you. They aren't recording your travel route through town, noting when you go pick up some fast food or black tar heroin. It gages your speed and other safety factors in your car like acceleration, blinkers, angle of tires, gas usage, etc. And it's not like they're designed by incompetant morons either. So the arguement of "what if your car goes airborn with your foot on the gas and it looks like you're going 90" goes out the window. You could take the data set of velocity and accelration to kids in a high school physics class and they'll be able to point out what happened. Crash investigators will be able to to the same, especially when they see your car upside down on the side of the road. So stop being paranoid people, the little chips in your car aren't out to get you.
I live in Kansas and I've visited numerous wind farms across the state while doing feasability studdies on them. Most of the noise complaints from citizens quickly die off as the normal perating sounds quickly fade into white nosie once they've been calibrated and equiped with dampeners. Also, in comparison, if somebody built a nuclear power plant or coal burning plant in the same spot as a wind farm would be built, those plants woulds produce 1000x the noise of wind farms and would look horrid anyways.
It's just sad that people always have to find some minor flaw with any power source to decry it. Some polute, some are loud, some require thousands of people to run, some dam rivers. Wind power is the cheapest, quietest, and most "eligant" design of any power source with practically zero impact on the environment.
At some point I need to just need to buy a bunch of DVDs and form The Retrospectus Of Video Game Movies and watch them for days straight until my brain starts to bleed. The Wizard and the live action Super Mario Bros are like the piannacle of Nintendo's movie making and have treasured (if not scary) places in my childhood memories
"won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!!!"
As was mentioned on Chewplastic's site, we might want to consider also doanting to Daniel Peng, another student who was hit by the RIAA at the same time. He seems to be having a harder time getting donations since he hasn't had as much media attention as Jesse Jordan did. Plus Jesse seems like he's not that far from getting his money back and I know the RIAA is sending out a WHOLE LOTTA CHECKS.
On a brief sidenote, this makes me very proud in the redeming qualities of the Internet and the overwhelming spirit of helping the Davids of the world fight thier Goliaths.
In the ultimate move of spite, take the $13 the RIAA is settling with and give it back to Jesse Jordan, the student who's life savings was taken by the RIAA in a "symbolic move." It's his money, we're just giving it back to him.
For example, see MTV's "Making The Game" shows modeled after their "Making The Video." They've did one of the LOTR:TT game and one on Def Jam Vendetta. They we're pretty much horrid 30 minute advertisements of repetitive gameplay videos and interviews with PR schmucks. Never once did they bother talking to the programmers or artists (probably for good reason). At least they didn't make one for Britney's Dance Factory, that would be the official end of Western Civilization.
You forgot the Virtual Boy :P Oh well, at least Nintenod's failed experiment with the VB led to their "why mess with a good thing" approach to GB development.
"Nintendo doesn't have a cool enough image to appeal to an older audience," Nikko's Fukuda said.
"What it should do is hold fast to the under-15 age group and create killer franchises based on cartoons or characters which can also be featured in card games."
Worst. Advice. Ever.
If I get one of these (which I won't) I'll have to deal with the following two annoyances.
1. When playing games, people will ask me why I'm molesting my cell phone.
2. When talking on the phone, people will ask me why I'm talking into a gameboy.
I got a GBASP a month ago and it's become part of my standard gear I take with me everywhere I go (cell phone, wallet, keys, pen, GBASP). It's perfect for killing time between meetings, classes, etc. Plus it fits perfectly in my cargo pockets (hey, they finally have a use) and the platinum case makes me feel all bling bling.
... except getting every world government, telcom, and technological researcher on the same page. Easy as pie.
You'll have to concede that the difficulty of implementing an SGI Fuel station into a college network is not anywhere near the relative scale of installing 30 Macs into a small school network. Hell, anybody who is a sys admin for a school district should by default need to now PC, Mac, and Linux these days. I'm not claiming they're lazy because the story has not mentioned their response, merely that the administrators shackled them with a Windows-only policy. Given their industry-standard job description and relative proximity to the Washington Tech Corridor, I'm fairly certain that they will be more than capable of putting 30 Macs in the network. This is just a case of school board members following one of their own (stupid)policies without thinking it out first. If this story is being /.'d then I'm fairly certain that they are getting enough flak about it and will allow the free Macs to be installed.
Quite frankly, I think Bill Gates has bigger fish to fry than some podunk town. I'm sure the logic was more on the side of the school board after they recieve the grant. It's like when you get a bottle of wine as a present. You thank the person out of courtesy. You don't know if the wine is any good or if you'll like it, but it seems like the polite thing to do. The school district thought this tokenistic thank you was an appropriate response when they really should have just said thank you.
I can back that statement up with my experience. I got to sit on a hiring committee for a new staff position that was responsible for being the technology "outreach" coordinator to students (letting them know about services, labs, computer deals through the university, etc). Because our labs are about 75% PC / 25% Mac and we have a good contract with Mac for shwocase technology, Mac knowledge was crucial. In the 400 something applications I had to sift through, I eliminated (by policy, not choice) 370 applications because they mentioned no experience with Macs.
The job market wants students to learn as much as possible about as much as possible (to steal a bad marketing phrase). Teaching kids how to use PCs AND Macs will benefit them so much years down the line. Hell, exposing the kids to computer use benefits them PERIOD.
As the teacher said "In a time of serious budget crunches in the schools, for them to turn down a gift of $43,000 just seems asinine." Couldn't have phrased it better myself.
...followed closely by Microsoft acquires all.
Here is some crap we did:
Seriously, tax the fricken parents. Make your kids go to the docotor for a checkup every year. If your kid comes back overweight, you pay a few more dollars. I gaurantee you that obesity in this country would start to drop if we forced parents to start acting like parents. Sign your kid up for a freaking soccer team or something. It's amazing how much weight little Johnny will lose if he has to go run around during practice and games a few times a week. Get your kids to eat pasta, salads, fruit. God forbid they might not like that you're making them live a healthy lifestyle. You can either have slightly discontent but healthy kids that'll have long, full lives and forget why they're mad at you quickly, or you can have lardass children that love you to death as a parent for no good reason, but will never get out of the house and will die of a heart attack before you ever croak.
But wait, we don't want to force parents to be grown ups. Screw that. Let's have all the adults keep acting like children. Point and blame other people for all the problems with your kids. Ignore reality. Act like a bratty 10 year old with legislative powers. Grow up adults, and start acting like one.
If you're going to sue me for damages for my mp3 collection, it assumes that they lost the money I would have spent on the product. This is faulty logic if i never had any intent on buying their product. 3 scenarios:
1.If I like the song (and others on the album), I'll go and buy it. Thus, they've suffered no lost
2. I don't like the song very much after all or the rest of the album is bad. I'm not going to buy it. My actions don't result in a loss because I don't buy CDs based on one song on the radio to begin with.
3. I have zero intention or have zero ability to purchase the album. Maybe it's a joke song. Maybe its a crappy song I'm downloading to irritate my roomate. Maybe it is something out of print or not offered by any retailers I have access too. There was never an anticipation of the RIAA getting any profit from me, so my download has no net effect.
Now I don't exactly think this arguemnt will stand up in court or anything. The RIAA has purchased enough laws to prosecute anybody they want. But the fact of the matter, which is made very clear by the RIAA goon's statement, is that the RIAA just doesn't get it. They've stifled the public's ability to get a variety of music for so long and now the dam has burst and they're drowning. People like to hear music. It makes us happy, sad, romantic, nostalgic, etc. But when you charge people inflated prices for little discs, raise concert prices above the $100 mark, homogonize the radio, and protest at the slightest attempt at competition, people are bound to turn on you at some point. The fact that they still haven't figured that out is a testament to how screwed up the industry is.
Will spend an extra $10 and build a testes adapter.
Come on, what better name than Ballz of Steel
I mean cmon, at least call it Karaoke Karaoke Revolution. Then we can sit back and watch the KKR Remixes flow in.
Nobody likes a room full of smelly nerds.
At least they didn't name the Platinum one 'Bling Bling'